Right now, of the three attack stances only two are ever used. Agressive or cautious. There is no reason whatsoever to use normal attack. I would suggest changing the modes to max range, max damage and max accuracy (the economy setting). The max accuracy mode would be used to maximize payload efficiency in exchange for longer time under enemy fire.
Max range has low accuracy and low fire rate.
Max accuracy has low fire rate and low distance
Max damage has high fire rate at low distance with medium or low accurracy. The resulting DPS is higher than in max accuracy mode.
...or something similar
The proper implementation that requires the modders to do some work would be to extend the range and accuracy parameters of a weapon to hold three values like the firing speed. The no-work-for-modders implementation is to have fixed multipliers for the stances. For example max accuracy mode has a range multiplier of 0.7, an accuracy muliplier of 1.2, while having a firing interval multiplier of 1.5.
Furthermore, I would like the option to reduce air combat outcome variance, as this really annoys me. Is there any reason why enemy ufos have a 0-100% damage range while your interceptors do 50-100%? I would like the option to give enemy ufos 50-100% damage range as well.
What further increases variance is a high evade, mostly reached through pilot bonuses. The high evade low hp craft can then win encounters unscathed or die in two shots. In heroes of might and magic 5 there was the ethereal stat that gave a 50% miss chance. It was implemented in a very not-annoying way. If you missed two consecutive attacks, the next attack was a sure hit. To balance it, it worked the other way around too. If there were two consecutive hits, the third attack was a guaranteed miss.
Implementing this for other miss chances than 50% could look like this:
For a 10% hit chance, if 9 attacks miss, the 10th attack is a guaranteed hit. Allowed consecutive misses before a guaranteed hit is triggered is 1/percentage, rounded up, minus one. So 11% hit chance would be 1/0.11 = 9.09. Rounded up to 10, minus 1 gives 9 misses before a guaranteed hit. Obviously this mechanism needs a 2 missed shot cap at the low end. I would also be in favor of having a cap on the high end of 10 missed shots that would prevent evade abuse.
It might not be necessary to implement the other end as well that would prevent the two shot death, a guaranteed miss after a hit for a high evade craft. The player got a bonus to air combat when pilot bonuses where introduced. If my suggested changes increase the guaranteed damage of ufos, this is just fair to counterbalance the pilot bonuses.
